Recently, I started digging into the OpenBazaar scene. I have been following it for a long time now, and have messed around with it through the years by installing it and looking around and that was about it.
Until recently, it wasn't super easy to install and get running, but things have really changed. You can have it downloaded, installed and a store up and running in a matter of a few minutes. Everything is pretty straight forward and simple in terms of usability.
The OpenBazaar team is hard at work rolling out updates and has been concentrating on infrastructure, but I think things are starting to take a turn towards features now.
What would it take for a market like OpenBazaar to compete with the likes of Craigslist?
The first hurdle I see is the ever present challenge of getting into and out of crypto-currency. It seems like we are getting closer everyday with Bitcoin ATMs and CoinStar supposedly starting to roll out Bitcoin sales. We also have markets like @swapsteem building a peer-to-peer marketplace to buy and sell with Fiat, including PayPal transactions. That could be a real asset.
So, it is a hurdle for mainstream adoption, but movement toward solving the problem is happening.
The second hurdle I see is the ever present marketing challenge that pretty much every open source project faces. Is there a budget?
OpenBazaar does not charge any fees to list, buy or sell. Moderators may charge for their services, but the platform has no fees.
Will the communities support the project marketing and even take on responsibilities ourselves? Will that prove sustainable? I have been putting a lot of thought and research into how to make open source projects sustainable and provide marketing and I do think there are ways to accomplish this with the tools we have today - namely Steem. The more I think about it, the more I think that Steem is the greatest project asset we have ever seen.
I'm just wondering, but does Craigslist do any marketing these days?
My OpenBazaar Store
Check out my store: ob://QmbbhRFX8JABjmZxoU8ycGBrY8y266MW5nymNRPu3yACko/store
To do that, just head over to the OpenBazaar website and download your version.
Once it is installed, just copy the address above and paste it into the search/ address bar at the top of the app.
If you have a store, share it with us. If not, do you have anything to sell that you can list and then share it with us?
Please support @SteemOnOB (Steem on OpenBazaar Project) to be able to pay natively with Steem.
This would be a huge asset to our community and the OpenBazaar communities. Steem is one of the fastest transactions, if not the fastest of all the blockchains, plus transactions are free. This would certainly make Steem a very attractive choice and open a lot of exposure to Steem as a crypto as well as the communities it supports.
Please consider delegating to @SteemOnOB or donating for task bounties. This is a special account that is used STRICTLY for promoting and supporting getting Steem on OpenBazaar, so please follow and support us in any way you can.
Much more to come, soon!
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://diggndeeper.com/check-out-my-openbazaar-store/
Very cool! Once we get Steem up and running on OpenBazaar there’ll be a huge new audience exposed to the possibilities of Steem 😊
Posted using Partiko iOS
I believe so. And a whole new way for Steemians to spend their favourite currency, too.
Win, win!
@diggndeeper.com this is amazing! I really don't trust Craigslist anymore. Through the years it has got a bad reputation.
The OB project sounds awesome. I am going to download this and yes I do have many items I can list! Gently used kids toys, Thomas Kinkade paintings and other popular artists, lots of odds and ends.
Thanks for sharing once I get it set up and figured out I will share it as you requested. Talk soon,
@bit-trader
Posted using Partiko Android
Awesome. I think you find it to be pretty straight forward.
I look forward to checking out your store.
This is interesting. Glad to see openbazaar is doing it's thing and still going.
We have our own marketplace at the IFC and it was doing really well at first when the value of steem was higher and we had a bunch of transactions and stores that opened, but ever since the value of steem dropped it's been really quiet in there..
I think that's one of the main hurdles right now, I feel like if the value of steem went back up even to just a dollar or a couple of dollars that would make a huge difference, but as long as it's below a dollar I think it makes it really difficult for business.
I still highly believe in our marketplace as well, though not sure how to really help it grow much right now with the market where it is and with steem as slow as it is..
But.. There's a few other people trying to do similar as well. I remember hearing about Dstor? And it seemed like they had a bunch of drama and not sure where that's going, there was also steembay I think? or steempay? And a few others.. There's been quite a few attempts to link steem to real world value and I think there's a tremendous amount of potential here. Also this sort of links into our other conversation about freedom and going in a new direction as I think if we had our own currency which we could set up marketplaces for and buy and sell and trade physical items.. That would be a major step towards obsoleting the old forms of power. Will that be steem? I can't say for sure, but I do think that's an important part of the equation to freeing ourselves more.
I saw that IFC mentioned just a minute ago. What is that?
Absolutely. We have to be the change we want to see.
Will Steem be a major crypto? I think is certainly can be.The only way that will happen, though is if we grind it out and add value every day in every way. The tech will stand up, but we have a lot of work to do.
Side note: I think the biggest thing keeping Steem down is all the people that come in and immediately power down and never do anything. It's really a literal drag on the value of the platform. I don't have a solution, but I do think that is our main problem right now.
The IFC is a contest/community I came up with the idea for last year in January, it stands for Information Finding Championship, or the discord channel with the marketplace is the Information Finding Channel.
We're on our second season of the game, it's sorta like the UFC except instead of people physically beating the crud out of each other it's a mental competition and we have judges and award prizes and the grand prize winner gets a crystal trophy and a picture drawn up of them plus some steem.
We had a lot more players the first season just like we had a lot more business in the marketplace cause steem was much more popular at the time I think because the value of steem was higher. Though this is a longterm game and I have a feeling in time the value will rise again and people will flock back and that we sorta just have to ride the "ups and downs".. Eventually I think our community will get it's own coin. It might be a SMT, or maybe something else. I don't know yet but I do think our community deserves its own coin some day.
In fact.. My idea originally was to create a coin that could sort of compete with bitcoin and all the other coins and be one of the main coins, the "information finding" aspect is something I think can be applied to anything cause I think everything is information.. So the same way someone searches for a topic on Google in the same way someone searches for an item on Ebay or Amazon or whatever, it's all information.
Speaking of Google, our IFC game sort of acts like a human Google as well.. It's a really deep subject with many many layers and levels and hopefully in time our idea gains more attention and support.
I sorta doubt our coin will ever be a main coin, but.. It's a dream. :) And who knows.. I saw so many people creating their own coins.. I wanted to do one too and I thought one surrounded around the topic of information could be a major one!
The contest was more of an afterthought cause I saw so many contests doing well on steem and I decided to try to marry the ideas and right now people love the contest so much it will hopefully be the vehicle that some day makes the Marketplace work.
I think if you can combine gamification and the marketplace that that is a great way to go! People love playing games and if you can merge that with buying things sorta like on Ebay when you get a star for each transaction or whatever then it sorta makes it into a fun game.
Most of the business our marketplace did were from players of our game or members of the game community, it was fascinating to see this game merging the digital world with the real one and how they could set up shops and sell and trade with each other using any currency P2P. I think there's amazing potential here but it's been so slow ever since the value of steem went down that I get discouraged sometimes.
A lot of big name crypto people think games are going to be a major aspect of bringing more people into the crypto sphere, so.. Hopefully our game can play a role.. And since the UFC is so incredibly popular you would think a mental version that is similar to it would also have a place? I still have high hopes and dreams, time will tell what happens though.
Agreed. However the management team has really been messing a lot of things up and driving a lot of people away.. It might still be such a powerful tool and idea that it continues anyways and becomes the next Facebook however they are giving competitors a chance to slide in the way they are doing things in my opinion.
Yeah that makes a good amount of sense that there's a lot of drag from people just trying to make as much money as they can, though I think one of the major problems is what I mentioned above about how steemit INC is really scaring a lot of people away by the copious amounts of mistakes they are making.. I've seen soo many people claim they are quitting cause of what steemit INC is doing.. I think if steem doesn't become a main coin one day it's probably going to be because of the way their management really mismanaged so many different things and didn't show enough support to the people who are keeping this place alive.
There's a lot of money out there, who knows how much.. Yet if people keep getting scared off from even using this place, all that potential just evaporates. And I think there's been a lot of people who have been so turned off by certain things that they may not come back and give it another chance in the future.
I remember steemit inc once was credited with saying something like. "We're not worried about the first million users, we're worried about the first 100 million" or something like that, but if they don't take care of the first million, we may never see 100 million.
Very interesting.
Word! If you'd like to learn more about the IFC you can go to our page here on steem at @ifc and then here's the discord link as well if you'd like to check out the marketplace, but.. It's really slow right now in there.. Like a ghost town unfortunately. :\
https://discord.gg/gFyv4AV
Also if you have any other questions or ideas please feel free to ask or bring it to my attention! Cheers. :)
Why does a low value for Steem make it harder to sell things?
At least from my experience in the Marketplace I created people were doing a lot more business when the value of steem was around a dollar or higher and the two main reasons I think for this is that there was a higher demand for steem cause people believed in it more and thought it was more valuable and the second reason is because you could buy more with less, for example.. When steem was a worth a USD you could say buy a crystal or a drawing or a hat or whatever in one of the shops for 10 steem, now with steem at around 30 cents, it would cost around 3X that in steem and be like 30 steem or more.
For me personally that decrease in value means I'll be spending a lot more steem to purchase anything than I used to pay. And I'm sure other people in the marketplace felt similar.
That's quite impressive time to make it big : )
Thanks! We have such cool tools available now.
I already was fiddling around with OpenBazaar a year or so ago, but I didn't get it running on my Raspberry Pi back then.
Maybe it is time to have another look onto OB again :)
I hope you do! Do you think you will start a store? If you do, share it with us so we can support you.
I dont know for Sure, I am busy for the Moment but if I do I am Sure in for a community! Thx for the invitation :)
What kind of things do people here want to buy on OB?
I don't know what people want to buy, but anything including services, digital goods, physical goods and crypto can be traded on OB.